What Ivy did not say

There are two glaring omissions from communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri's 2007 budget vote speech - any mention of money and Telkom.

Within the public process, budget vote speeches by ministers are important in that they justify the policy direction where they are going to spend the money they have been able to appropriate from either the National Treasury or other sources.

No one expects a minister to deliver a detailed budget as this is often left to the departments' strategic planners. However, by using the old investigator's adage of "follow the money" or, in this case, the lack of it, one gets an idea of where a minister sits in the political pecking order.

By being able to quote rands in actual numbers, a minister is able to deliver a speech that is part political, part transparent in that it gives some idea of the public process, and part bragging by showing how important the minister is through the ability to get his or her hands on public funds.

Matsepe-Casaburri's and foreign affairs minister Dlamini Zuma's are the only two budget vote speeches this year, that I am aware of, which do not talk about budgets at all.

The foreign affairs budget is, I suppose, largely centred on catering for functions, but that of the Department of Communications has severe repercussions for the ICT industry and the country at large.

National signal distributor Sentech is still struggling to secure the R700 million it needs to put in place a digital migration plan to convert the country's aging analogue broadcasting signal to a more efficient digital format. Although Cabinet has approved a three-year migration period, to end on 1 November 2011, the amounts trickling through from the National Treasury seem insignificant for it to meet this task.

Opposition parties implied the minister had such a low status among her Cabinet colleagues, that she was unable to secure the funding.

Paul Vecchiatto, Cape Town correspondent

Sentech CEO Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane was understandably visibly disappointed at the lack of news on funding for her organisation, which Cabinet has classified as a strategic asset.

"The longer the funding is delayed, the longer it takes to order the equipment and for it to be made and then to install," she told me after the speech.

Public enterprises minister Alec Erwin seems to have had no problem in securing R957 million for new broadband supplier Infraco, which was all but a speck on the public radar just a year ago.

All the political parties on the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications bewailed the lack of Sentech funding. Committee chairman Godfrey Oliphant (ANC) likened it to government having two wives, namely Infraco and Sentech. "A man cannot take a second wife, if he neglects the first one," he said.

Opposition parties implied the minister had such a low status among her Cabinet colleagues, that she was unable to secure the funding.

In her reply, Matsepe-Casaburri thanked all the political parties for their support in asking for Sentech's funding and said: "I will relay the message to the people who have the money bags."

This lack of ability to secure funding for a fully operational asset, such as Sentech, begs the question: can the department secure funding for the Nepad Broadband Infrastructure Network Project? The proposed land and sea fibre optic system is supposed to reduce Africa's dependence on foreign-controlled international communications links.

The absence of any mention of Telkom by Matsepe-Casaburri is almost disquieting. The sudden departure of its CEO Papi Molotsane should have warranted some mention and certainly something should have been said about a possible replacement. Leaving Africa's largest and most profitable telecommunications utility with only an acting head is unsettling at a time when the sector is going through considerable change.

Some kind of public explanation of Molotsane's exit should be given and just how his replacement is going to be selected.

I suppose with all the brouhaha surrounding another of her portfolio organisations, the SA Post Office, the minister feels she only has time for one crisis. Telkom is also in a closed period ahead of the publication of its annual results on or around 13 June, so everyone will be watching to see what happens then.

Overall, Matsepe-Casaburri's budget vote speech is a checklist of what the Electronic Telecommunications Act requires her to do. However, like many other politicians, it is what she doesn't say that tells us what the state of play is.

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